Upgrade to Node 12.x

[tylersmalley]

Node 12 is the next LTS release. It contains quite a few changes which will effect our project, including the changes to how heap limits are set. We need to understand the effect this upgrade has on Kibana and work to upgrade.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-operations (Team:Operations)

[epixa]

I think there is a strong likelihood that Node 10 will be EOL before we release 9.0, so I think we need to upgrade to Node 12 in both 7.x and 8.0. It would need to block 8.0 unless we were OK with rolling out a major node upgrade in a 7.x patch, which I don't think we should be.

[watson]

Node.js 12 thoughts from a security perspective:

TL;DR: 👍

OpenSSL

Node.js 12 updates OpenSSL to v1.1.1b (nodejs/node#26327).

TLS

Node.js 12 adds support for TLSv1.3 (nodejs/node#26209).

llhttp

Node.js 12 ships with a brand new HTTP parser called llhttp (nodejs/node#24870).

The old http_parser was a bit of a mess and wasn't spec-compliant and had historically contained a few security bugs. And since nobody wanted to touch it there was a higer-than-normal risk of security-related issues hiding inside it.

You can tell Node.js 12 to keep using the old parser using the command line flag --http-parser=legacy. It would be fun to do a benchmark with and without this to see if the new parser also improved our processing speed.

[watson]

I think there is a strong likelihood that Node.js 12 will no longer be Active LTS once we release 8.0. So we should consider jumping directly to Node.js 14 if this is targeted for the v8.0 release.

Node.js 14 initial release: 2020-04-21
Node.js 14 Active LTS start: 2020-10-20
Node.js 12 exits Active LTS and enters maintenance mode: 2020-10-21
(Dates are subject to change).

[tylersmalley]

Thanks @watson, you're correct. I have created an issue for 14.x here: #54039

[joshdover]

So to be clear, we're expecting to use Node 14.x LTS in both 8.0 and 7.10?

[tylersmalley]

@joshdover that is correct since 7.10 is a long supported release, assuming 7.10 stays the last minor.

[joshdover]

I see this is being planned on for the near-term. Just wanted to point out that v14 is supposed to be released on April 21st, so it may make sense to wait just a few more weeks to avoid two major upgrades in the 7.x series?

[watson]

I'll give this one a try now just to see if I can get an overview of how much work there is. It's probably going to be easier to take this in two steps and go to v12 first and then to v14.